Tragedy of Labour's collapse into utter irrelevance: LEO McKINSTRY on why the party is little more than a personality cult or far-Left fundamentalist movement devoid of credibility

The decline of the Labour Party is appalling to witness. In the Sixties, after his second General Election victory, Harold Wilson described Labour as ‘the natural party of government’.

Less than 20 years ago, Labour under Tony Blair enjoyed one of the biggest landslides in history. Today, the party is little more than a personality cult or far-Left fundamentalist movement, devoid of credibility and relevance.

The immediate cause of this, of course, is Jeremy Corbyn, now an utterly derisory figure and by far the worst Leader of the Opposition in the modern history of British politics.

The immediate cause of Labour's decline, of course, is Jeremy Corbyn, now an utterly derisory figure and by far the worst Leader of the Opposition in the modern history of British politics

He has been in his post for only ten months, yet he has managed in that time to leave his party catastrophically divided and farther away from government than ever through his mixture of puerile extremism and spectacular incompetence.

Not only have most of his front bench resigned in protest at his ineptitude, but last month his MPs passed a vote of no confidence in him by 172 votes to 40.

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Yet Corbyn still clings on with a limpet-like tenacity and deranged vanity to force a leadership contest, ruthlessly exploiting trade union muscle and loopholes in the electoral rules to sign up a vast and sinister army of so-called ‘registered supporters’ as his backers.

In just two days last week, no fewer than 140,000 ‘registered supporters’ were recruited — more than the entire membership of the Tory Party. According to internal estimates, at least 60 per cent of them are Corbyn enthusiasts.

Which means it’s almost certain that, despite being loathed by his own MPs, Corbyn will remain leader after the contest in September, having seen off the polished but low-profile Pontypridd MP Owen Smith, standing as a ‘unity candidate’ against him.

What then? How can Labour continue to function or provide a competent Opposition to hold the Government to account?

Less than 20 years ago, Labour under Tony Blair enjoyed one of the biggest landslides in history.

The obvious answer is that it should split. All those MPs who have expressed no confidence in Corbyn should form a new party and proclaim themselves the official Opposition through sheer weight of numbers.

A competent moderate Labour MP such as former Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, or ex-paratrooper Dan Jarvis, or former leadership contender Liz Kendall should take the helm.

Yet none of them seems to have the guts. Benn has already said he doesn’t want Labour to split. So the party’s self-immolation looks set to continue as Corbyn’s idiotic and nihilistic followers are led farther into the wilderness by their Messiah.

Having dedicated a large part of my early life to Labour, and decades to writing about politics, I despair as I watch this catastrophe.

A competent moderate Labour MP such as ex-paratrooper Dan Jarvis should take the helm of the party

Full of youthful ambition and idealism, I joined the party in 1985 when I graduated from university, and soon my politics became my life.

I worked as an aide to Harriet Harman at Westminster and served as a Labour councillor in the London borough of Islington.

Throughout these years I was on the moderate wing of the party, believing that Labour needed the widest possible appeal to take power. But many of my comrades had very different ambitions.

In my local constituency party of Islington North, where Jeremy Corbyn was the MP, he and the dominant hard Left peddled their dream of a socialist revolution.

I remember at one meeting hearing Corbyn declare that Labour’s job was not to reform capitalism but to ‘overthrow it’. At the same time, he would regularly defend the IRA or proclaim his belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament.

He was always courteous but also profoundly unimpressive as a politician, lacking any authority or intellectual rigour.

If I had been told then that, three decades later, Jeremy Corbyn would be Labour leader, I would have burst out laughing.

Where Corbyn excelled, however, was in the support network he built to propagate his gospel of radicalism. Plots among the moderates to get him out failed in the face of his formidable ability to organise his acolytes and supporters.

Corbyn’s antics were one of the main reasons for my growing disillusionment with the party and the cause of socialism. In the mid-Nineties I gave up Labour activism.

Yet the takeover of a once-proud institution by Corbyn and his extremists still saddens me to the core, for it represents a betrayal of Labour’s fine traditions which have served British democracy so well.

This, after all, is the party that, in coalition with Churchill, helped to defeat Nazi Germany. After the war it built the Welfare State.

It is the party that legalised homosexuality, brought in equal pay legislation, gave freedom to India, helped to found Nato, created the Open University and pioneered Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent.

Labour has in the past been led by great patriotic figures such as Clement Attlee, a World War I veteran, and Jim Callaghan, a naval veteran of World War II.

The same patriotism infused the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell, who famously warned in 1962 that Britain’s embrace of Brussels would mean ‘the end of a thousand years of history’.

Today this once-great party has been reduced to a shell, which makes it all the more dispiriting that there is no one of stature to stand against Corbyn.

In 1976 Jim Callaghan had to win the Labour leadership against Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Michael Foot and Tony Benn, all of them giants in the political pantheon. But now Corbyn’s only opponent is self-styled radical Owen Smith, a complete unknown whose career so far has been marked by neither courage nor originality.

Yet while Corbyn might be a disaster, his supremacy is, I believe, a symptom rather than the cause of Labour’s chronic malaise.

The party used to be the authentic, mainstream voice of the British working class, but today it has utterly severed its connection with its traditional supporters.

The rot set in during the reign of Tony Blair. Although he was a huge initial success at the ballot box, he began to alienate Labour’s base through his obsession with using immigration as a tool of social engineering.

He cranked up migration to unprecedented levels, transforming the fabric of society without any mandate or even debate.

His speechwriter Andrew Neather later claimed that Blair was so keen on immigration because he wanted to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. But it was, in fact, the working class who were hit hardest as migrants took their jobs and placed vast pressure on the schools, GP surgeries and other public services they used.

Inevitably, these traditional Labour supporters started deserting in droves — many of them to Ukip.

But instead of addressing these concerns, the Labour high command held that anyone who questioned mass immigration was a racist.

The attitude was encapsulated in Gordon Brown’s description of Rochdale pensioner and Labour supporter Gillian Duffy — who questioned him about migration levels during the 2010 General Election campaign — as a ‘bigoted woman’.

As Labour abandoned its roots, so it became ever narrower in its outlook. No longer a national movement, it became the representative of vested interests and fashionable metropolitan causes.

So the party of Attlee is now dominated by public sector union bosses, cheerleaders for benefit claimants, self-appointed migrant advocates and middle-class ‘virtue-signallers’ who support the party to show that they supposedly ‘care’ about the downtrodden in society.

It has nothing to say to the vast majority of voters who work in the private sector and have an instinctive belief in Britain’s national identity.

Added to this, Labour under Corbyn has truly become the nasty party of British politics.

There is a tone of menace about the leadership, and a spirit of bullying and intimidation among its newfound supporters.

These were recruited by the shadowy hard-Left organisation Momentum, established in 2015 to keep Corbyn as Labour leader. Many of its members are zealots, hardliners and even anarchists.

Little surprise, then, that Corbyn presides over a party awash with anti-Semitism — under the guise of pro-Islamic anti-Zionism — and rampant misogyny.

While the Tories have just elected their second woman Prime Minister, the Corbynistas have been indulging in a campaign of brutal intimidation against Labour women who dare to question the leader.

In one of the worst cases, Angela Eagle, the Wallasey MP who bravely triggered the leadership contest, not only had a brick through her constituency office window but has now been told by the police that she should not hold surgeries ‘for her own safety’.

Labour used to see itself as a broad church. Under Jeremy Corbyn it has turned into a narrow, vicious sect which seeks to crush dissent wherever it is found and whose culture is a cross between McCarthyism and the Spanish Inquisition.

How desperately the party — and the country — needs a leader of distinction who can rediscover Labour’s traditional supporters and rekindle the fire and patriotism of Attlee or Callaghan.

And, tragically, how very distant the prospect of that happening now seems.